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What the TSA Patdown Searches Are Really About

You can hardly watch a TV news show, listen to a radio broadcast, pick
up a newspaper, or read the Internet without hearing about the
aggressive Transportation Security Agency patdown searches at airports.

The TSA and all relevant officials tell us that they’re really for our
own protection. But are they? In truth, the searches have virtually
nothing to do with increased airport security.

Several years ago, my four year-old daughter was pulled aside in one
such screening because she happened to be the Nth person in the line to
go through security. Though she was traveling with me, her mother, and
sister, she was subjected to 40 minutes of terrifying interrogations and
inspections of all her personal effects, though not a bodily patdown.

The startling part of it was the mindlessness of it all. The guards
were simply being good Nazis. Today, it is no longer mindless. It is
part of a sustained campaign to condition the American public to being
humiliated by government officials in the name of national security.

Physical humiliation of the subject is the first act that an
interrogator performs on a victim. You can see this in the pictures
from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The prisoners were made to perform all
manner of humiliating acts: wear women’s underwear on their heads;
masturbate in front of female guards; pile onto one another naked;
submit to rape by their guards; etc.

The humiliation destroys a prisoner’s dignity. It is from his innate
sense of dignity that a person finds the indignation, and therefore the
capacity, to resist abuse. It is our dignity that the TSA and the
government must strip from us if they wish to reduce our capacity to
resist their aggressive encroachments on our civil liberties. And it’s
working.

It’s amazing how many people say that the searches are worth
it—something upwards of 75% if the news reports can be believed. They
have already internalized the submission to authority that makes an
authoritarian state so effective. And they create the public pressure
for others to submit as well.

These are the same people who tell questioners that they don’t mind if
the government secretly reads their email because they have nothing to
hide. The suggestion is that those who do protest wholesale invasions
of privacy, even for such quaint reasons of guarantees against such
invasion rooted in the U.S. Constitution, must have something to hide.

This is what makes an effective authoritarian state self-policing, as
was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Resistance to abuse is a prima
facia sign of guilt.

It is not an accident that the matter is saturating the media to the
point of exhaustion. The message is very straightforward and all
reinforcing: you need to be afraid; we’re doing this for your own good;
and don’t resist for resistance is futile.

Not a day goes by any more that some incident, somewhere, by somebody is
portrayed as a threat to U.S. national security and, therefore, a
reason why civil liberties must be reduced even more.

The ultimate absurdity of this was seen in the summer of 2009 in the
discussion about escalating the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The
National Security Agency reported that there were “at most 100” Al Qaeda
fighters in Afghanistan.

So, on the basis of this existential threat, the U.S. sent in another
100,000 soldiers and civilian support personnel. That’s 1,000 soldiers
at a million dollars a year apiece for each cave dweller posing mortal
threats to the U.S. way of life 11 time zones and a 6,000 mile ocean
away.

The absurdity has become palpable. The government doesn’t even try to
hide that it reads our email and listens to our phone calls, that it has
suspended habeas corpus, the longest standing protection of a people
against the abuses of a rogue government. It no longer denies that the
president claims the right to murder Americans for any pretext, without
due process of law, so long as he deems that person a threat to national
security.

The truth is that the government is not fighting wars against terrorists
any more. It is creating, provoking, escalating wars and then using
the resistance as the pretext to create a police state capable of
conducting a war against its own people.

Of course, it will be so much easier if it can convince the people to
surrender their rights willingly, voluntarily, to submit as the cattle
that must be their ultimate, inescapable fate. Public, inescapable,
physical humiliation is just one of the ways to condition people to that
subservience.

It’s working.

This is the world we live in. This is the world we cover.

Because of people like you, another world is possible. There are many battles to be won, but we will battle them together—all of us. Common Dreams is not your normal news site. We don't survive on clicks. We don't want advertising dollars. We want the world to be a better place. But we can't do it alone. It doesn't work that way. We need you. If you can help today—because every gift of every size matters—please do.

Robert Freeman is the author of The Best One Hour History series, which includes World War I, The French Revolution, The Vietnam War, and other titles. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a nonprofit that builds infrastructure projects in the developing world from donations as small as one dollar.

Further

God bless the Finns: They've been there for us after the Idiot-In-Chief visited a ravaged California and babbled how we have to "take care of the floors" and be like Finland where "they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things." Cue pics of dutiful Finns taking to the forest with their rakes and vacuums. Trump also said he still doesn't believe in climate change but "I want great climate." We do too, but first we want a president who's not barking mad.

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